PLEASE NOTE WE'LL BE CLOSED ON SATURDAY FOR INDEPENDENCE DAY. REGULAR HOURS RESUME ON SUNDAY.

1st Annual Galley Giveaway
Saturday, Aug 1
12-5pm
Members only: 10-12

During the month of July, collect one (1) ticket for every fifteen ($15) dollars you spend at Newtonville Books. Then on August 1 all tickets may be redeemed for galleys, one ticket, one galley. Newtonville Books is not responsible for lost tickets.

*A galley is also known as an Advance Reader Copy that publishers give bookstores before a particular book comes out.

UPCOMING EVENTS

++Thu, July 9, 7PM:  Jennifer Haigh, author of THE CONDITION, and Amy Hempel, author of THE COLLECTED STORIES OF AMY HEMPEL – Paperback Books & Brews

About THE CONDITION:

In the summer of 1976, during their annual retreat on Cape Cod, the McKotch family came apart. Now, twenty years after daughter Gwen was diagnosed with Turner's syndrome—a rare genetic condition that keeps her trapped forever in the body of a child—eminent scientist Frank McKotch is divorced from his pedigreed wife, Paulette. Eldest son Billy, a successful cardiologist, lives a life built on secrets and compromise. His brother Scott awakened from a pot-addled adolescence to a soul-killing job and a regrettable marriage. And Gwen—bright and accomplished but hermetic and emotionally aloof—spurns all social interaction until, well into her thirties, she falls in love for the first time. With compassion and almost painful astuteness, The Condition explores the power of family mythologies—the self-delusions, denials, and inescapable truths that forever bind fathers and mothers and siblings.

About THE COLLECTED STORIES:

Hempel's four collections of short fiction are all masterful; while readers await the follow-up to last year's acclaimed The Dog of the Marriage, this compendium restores the full set to print. The first of Hempel's books, Reasons to Live (1985), is justly celebrated by Rick Moody in his preface as a landmark of its era's "short-story renaissance"; it introduces Hempel's unmistakable tone, where a "besieged consciousness," Moody says, hones sentences to bladelike sharpness "to enact and defend survival." The second, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom (1990), is the main reason to buy this book: used copies are scarce, and the collection contains stories like "The Harvest." Hempel's genius, whether in first or third person, is to make her characters' feelings completely integral to the scenes they inhabit; her terse descriptions become elegantly telegraphic—and telepathic—reportage, with not a word wasted and not a single fact embellished. Her great subject is the failure of human coupling, and she charts it at every stage: giddy beginnings, sexy thick-of-its, wan (or violent) outcomes, grim aftermaths. Seeing it laid out kaleidoscopically in this volume is an awesome thing indeed, and a pleasure lovers of the short story will not want to deny themselves. (Publishers Weekly)

++Fri, July 10, 3PM: Middle Reader Bookclub meets to discuss THE LONDON EYE MYSTERY by Siobhan Dowd

Ted and Kat watched their cousin Salim board the London Eye, but after half an hour it landed and everyone trooped off—except Salim. Where could he have gone? How on earth could he have disappeared into thin air? Ted and his older sister, Kat, become sleuthing partners, since the police are having no luck. Despite their prickly relationship, they overcome their differences to follow a trail of clues across London in a desperate bid to find their cousin. And ultimately it comes down to Ted, whose brain works in its own very unique way, to find the key to the mystery. This is an unput-downable spine-tingling thriller—a race against time.

++Sun, July 12, 2PM: Paul Yoon, author of ONCE THE SHORE, and Dave King, author of THE HA-HA – Paperback Books & Brews

About ONCE THE SHORE:

Yoon's collection of eight richly textured stories explore the themes of family, lost love, silence, alienation and the effects of the Japanese occupation and the Korean War on the poor communities of a small South Korean island. In the namesake story, a lonely young waiter connects with an American widow who has come to find the cave where her husband claimed to have carved their initials during his tour of duty in Korea. The narrator shifts between Jim coping with the loss of his big brother, a fisherman killed by a surfacing American submarine, and the sorrow of the widow. In Among the Wreckage, aging parents Bey and Soni hope to recover the body of their son, Karo, killed in a U.S. military bombing test on what was thought to be a deserted island. The sad journey provides Bey an opportunity to examine his inability to show affection to his wife and only child. Yoon's stories are introspective and tender while also painting with bold strokes the details of the lives of the invisible. (Publishers Weekly)

About THE HA-HA:

King's compelling, compassionate debut revolves around Howie, who suffered a head injury in Vietnam and now can neither speak nor write. When Sylvia, an old girlfriend, asks Howie to care for Ryan, her nine-year-old biracial son, while she goes to a nearby detox center, Howie is initially overwhelmed by his new responsibilities but gradually falls into the role of father: making healthy breakfasts, listening to hip-hop, and signing Ryan up for a Little League team and even filling in as umpire. Howie and his three housemates proudly attend Ryan's end-of-the-year school program, and as the summer progresses, Howie dreads Sylvia's emergence from rehab--he can barely remember life before Ryan. Since his injury Howie has gradually withdrawn from all human contact except for the nuns at the convent where he mows the lawn and his stalwart group of housemates. Caring for Ryan has opened him up again to joy and sorrow, frustration and small accomplishments. The reader is drawn into Howie's world and roots for him with every first step he takes. (Booklist)

++(Please note revised date and time!) Thu, July 16, 7PM: Julia Glass, author of I SEE YOU EVERYWHERE, and Galt Niederhoffer, author of THE ROMANTICS – Paperback Books & Brews

About I SEE YOU EVERYWHERE:

In her third exquisite, piercing novel, National Book Award winner Glass juxtaposes the temperamentally opposite Jardine sisters. Analytical, cautious Louisa is destined to become an art critic and gallery owner. Reckless, sensual Clem is drawn to the wild and becomes a field biologist dedicated to protecting endangered species. While Louisa seeks marriage and motherhood, Clem catches and releases a stream of lovers. As the two women struggle for their place in the world, they embody archetypal struggles between nature and civilization, self and society. As compelling as the many-faceted Jardine sisters are, so is everyone in their circle, from their foxhound-breeder mother to the men in their lives: a history teacher, animal tracker, stuntman, and guru. Glass’ episodic, funny, and deeply inquiring novel is inlaid with priceless set pieces involving the sisters’ great-aunt Lucy; Titus, their mother’s kennel man; and Esteban, a Haitian artist who knits enormous sculptures. Terrible accidents, epic heartbreak, petty squabbles, and fatal despair are dramatized with Glass’ offhanded brilliance and charged with her hunger for enlightenment. Does art matter? Can we protect nature from ourselves? Can we ever truly understand each other, let alone other species? Isn’t it our calling as humans to try? Glass is a wisely questioning, ardent, and artful novelist. (Booklist)

About THE ROMANTICS:

Laura and Lila were once as close as could be--college roommates at the center of a tight-knit group of friends. But the friendship has wilted a bit. Now, ten years after college, the friends--and the boyfriend they shared--have reunited for Lila’s wedding at her family’s seaside estate in Maine.  

Laura is reserved, single, and the only Jew in the group, while the bride, Lila, is a WASP-y moneyed golden girl, and the groom, Tom, a swim team star from a working class Catholic background, is a perfect paradox of confidence and confusion.  As the wedding draws near and wine flows faster, the disappointments and desires of the reuniting friends come quickly to the surface. A drunken game on the estate’s dock goes awry when the revelers are pulled out to sea by the current.  When they swim back to shore, they are short by one—the groom. The search throws the group’s shifting allegiances into relief and results in new betrayals as well as confessions.

With Lila’s family’s picture-perfect Maine summer house as the backdrop, Laura not only sees her old friends in a new light, but reassesses herself as well—is she the only one of the group destined to be unmarried into her thirties?  Was it always this obvious that she was the only Jew in a pride of WASPs? Struggling with the traditionally thankless role of maid of honor—not to mention contending with Lila’s formidable mother Augusta—Laura also realizes she can't stop thinking about her complicated, long and intense relationship with the groom.  But isn't that relationship far in the past?

A wry observer of cultural and social mores, Niederhoffer creates a pitch-perfect group of characters and a winning novel about friendship, class and love.

++Sun, July 26, 2PM: Andre Dubus III, author of THE GARDEN OF LAST DAYS, and Margaret Cezair-Thompson, author of THE TRUE HISTORY OF PARADISE – Paperback Books & Brews

About THE GARDEN OF LAST DAYS:

From the author of the New York Times bestseller and Oprah's Book Club selection House of Sand and Fog--a new big-hearted, painful, page-turning novel.

One early September night in Florida, a stripper brings her daughter to work. April's usual babysitter is in the hospital, so she decides it's best to have her three-year-old daughter close by, watching children's videos in the office, while she works.
Except that April works at the Puma Club for Men. And tonight she has an unusual client, a foreigner both remote and too personal, and free with his money. Lots of it, all cash. His name is Bassam. Meanwhile, another man, AJ, has been thrown out of the club for holding hands with his favorite stripper, and he's drunk and angry and lonely.

From these explosive elements comes a relentless, raw, searing, passionate, page-turning narrative, a big-hearted and painful novel about sex and parenthood and honor and masculinity. Set in the seamy underside of American life at the moment before the world changed, it juxtaposes lust for domination with hunger for connection, sexual violence with family love. It seizes the reader by the throat with the same psychological tension, depth, and realism that characterized Andre Dubus's #1 bestseller, House of Sand and Fog--and an even greater sense of the dark and anguished places in the human heart.

About THE TRUE HISTORY OF PARADISE:

It is 1981. Jean Landing secretly plans to flee her beloved Jamaica–the only home her family has ever known, a place now rife with political turmoil. But before she can make her final preparations, she receives devastating news: Lana, her sister, is dead. The country’s state of emergency leaves no time to arrange a proper funeral. Even Jean’s mother, Monica, who hadn’t spoken to Lana in more than a decade, cannot fully embrace her grief.

The tragedy only underscores Jean’s need to leave an island that holds no promise of a future. Her harrowing journey to freedom across a battered landscape takes Jean through a terrain of memories: of her childhood, with a detached mother at odds with an adoring father, of her complex bond with Lana, and of the friends and lovers who have shaped and shared her days. Epic in scope, The True History of Paradise poignantly portrays the complexities of family and racial identity in a troubled Eden.

++Tues, July 28, 7PM: Newtonville Bookclub meets to discuss THE AGE OF SHIVA by Manil Suri

++Thu, July 30, 7PM:  Manil Suri, author of THE AGE OF SHIVA, and Don Lee, author of WRACK & RUIN – Paperback Books & Brews

About THE AGE OF SHIVA:

The second novel from Suri (The Death of Vishnu) follows Meera Sawhney from her unhappy 1950s marriage to aspiring singer Dev Arora through to her own son's coming-of-age. After an impulsive act forces Meera's marriage at 17, her complex, controlling father decries her tying herself (and, by extension, her family) to the provincial, lower-class Aroras. Meera soon finds herself pulled in different directions by her in-laws' religious orthodoxy, her father's progressivism (which doesn't run deep), her husband's self-pitying alcoholism and her own resentment. She finds salvation in the birth of a son, Ashvin; mother love, which Suri describes in intensely physical terms, gives her life passion and purpose, and overwhelms her adult relationships. But as India modernizes, Meera senses that Ashvin, and she herself, must live their own lives. Suri renders Meera's perspective marvelously, especially in small particulars (such as Meera's deliberations around the cutting of Ashvin's hair) and in the perils and conflicts Meera faces in her relationships with men. He also takes a close look at Hindu practices and charts the rise of religious nationalism in the years following Gandhi's death. Suri's vivid portrait of a woman in post-independence India engages timeless themes of self-determination. (Publishers Weekly)

++Tues, Aug 4, 7PM: Prize-Winning Bookclub meets to discuss GRACELAND by Chris Abani

The sprawling, swampy, cacophonous city of Lagos, Nigeria, provides the backdrop to the story of Elvis, a teenage Elvis impersonator hoping to make his way out of the ghetto. Nuanced, lyrical, and pitch perfect, this is a remarkable story of a son and his father, and an examination of postcolonial Nigeria, where the trappings of American culture reign supreme.

All events are held at the bookstore.

First come, first seated.

 

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